Today biological science is rising on a wall of worry. No other science has advanced more dramatically during the past several decades nor yielded so many palpable improvements in human welfare. Yet none except nuclear physics has aroused greater apprehensions among the general public and leaders in such diverse fields as religion, the humanities, and government. In this engaging book, Leon R. Kass, the noted teacher, scientist, and humanist, and James Q. Wilson, ...
This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures-and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense-that whatever can ...